But there’s something to be said for promulgating embargoed press releases, even if “Princeton, Harvard, and Yale Lead U.S.News & World Report’s Annual Ranking of Best National Universities” could almost be an Onion headline.
By
Bwog Staff on
Aug 16, 2007 
37 Comments
But there’s something to be said for promulgating embargoed press releases, even if “Princeton, Harvard, and Yale Lead U.S.News & World Report’s Annual Ranking of Best National Universities” could almost be an Onion headline.
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37 Comments
@question is barnard taken into account when Columbia is ranked? that could be killing us. just a thought.
@Alum U.S. News ranks Barnard separately, as a liberal arts college. It doesn’t factor into Columbia’s rankings in any significant way.
Barnard does poorly in the rankings because U.S. News doesn’t take its access to Columbia into account. It evaluates Barnard as if it had been severed from CU, which presents a very distorted picture of the school.
@Just a thought Maybe our rankings are lower because our alumni think that the singular form of alumni is alum?
@Alumnus Or maybe the gender-neutral “alum” is considered acceptable colloquial shorthand, even from those who studied Latin.
@Ahh Back to the old “if everyone’s doing it, I guess it’s okay” debate aren’t we? Although that’s a rather biased take. I’m all for neologisms, but I dislike non-standard colloquialisms that duplicate existing words, i.e. potash alum.
@Strunk&White Well gee, if you don’t like it then we better stop.
@confused they have schools in queens? i thought everything outside manhattan was one big dump…
@wow You’re a cockbag.
Being from Queens or any other outer borough is better than being some hick from Bumblefuck, USA, who doesn’t know jack shit about the city he goes to school in, which is about 75% of the Columbia population.
@i think that person was being sarcastic.
@uhh good point, basta!
Columbia [9] and carnegie melon [22] have the same reputation! And nobody pays attention to US News anyway!
@rather... *prezbo’s plan is OUR future…
@"pathetic" CLS #9 is correct, but I think this is slowly changing…people are realizing that they might as well be thankful for the chance to attend a great school.
and manhattanville is a major part of this: if a small group of students continues to loudly hate on prezbo, the culture of negativity and vitriol will continue. the expansion is happening, so this scenario doesn’t help anybody.
prezbo and his plan is OUR future and it’s a good one for everybody.
@Basta The way to add value to your degree is by knowing your shit and not acting like a d-bag.
@It's 4-20 Shouldn’t you be busy?
What a withering retort… The rankings have a direct impact on recruitment and where you’ll get your foot in the door once you graduate. You can act blase and pretend it doesn’t matter to you, but you’re doing yourself a disservice. Otherwise, why bother going to a top-ranked school at all? Why not just do really well and know your shit at some state honors college?
@Basta Do you honestly think that Columbia being ranked 9, 12, or 22 makes a difference with what people think of you (in any context)? (Or, when it comes to prestige/status, do you really believe Harvard is not regarded as the best at everything regardless of their rank?)
@Yes it does I’m not kidding about this. I’ve talked with HR reps at major media, banking and consulting companies and they will often only consider the top three, five or ten schools.
Next time you do an internship, if it has any kind of prestige what-so ever, take a look at how many people have degrees from top-ranked schools versus those who don’t. It gets worse post-graduation.
A slip in the ranks affects alumni giving, in turn affecting endowment, in turn scholarship monies available, etc. etc.
A slip from 9 to 12 might be functionally invisible, but 9 to 22-long term we’d be fucked.
@Basta I’ll be fine.
@Only Only because other people are busting their asses, helping Columbia’s reputation.
@Basta Please notice that the ranking criteria make no consideration of how hard any student busts his/her ass. (Have a nice weekend.)
@Please Please note that school ranking has a direct correlation with where you will end up after work.
Who do you think gets hired first? A 3.2 from Columbia or a 4.0 from CUNY-Queens?
@Basta All of you are pathetic for even discussing this.
@Why? Because you don’t give a shit about the value of the education you’re paying out the ass for?
The more value we can add to a Columbia degree, the better we’ll all fare in the long run. You ignore this shit at your peril.
@alum Columbia is low because of historically bad alumni giving.
Keep in mind that the school was not really a fully-residential college until the construction of Schapiro in the 80s. School spirit drives alumni giving – which drives the rankings. Columbia, for some reason, tends to attract those who seem to despise the school, even as they pay tuition.
@They fix cce They need to attract better and more diverse companies to campus, for one thing. They should also stop condoning the behavior of jerks like the whack-job who brought in the Minutemen, SHOCC, the International Socialists, Sanchez and all those other groups who completely divide our campus.
@Alum Schapiro was under construction when I graduated 20 years ago, but the College was fully residential at least from the time I arrived in ’83. SEAS had more commuters than it does now but that wasn’t due to lack of housing; it simply wasn’t as well known outside the NYC area as it is now and thus drew a lot more local applicants. Many of the local SEAS undergrads were immigrants or the children of immigrants and were more willing to commute than today’s students. (And no, I can’t explain why the same isn’t true of immigrants and their children today.)
@immigrant You speak of children of immigrant parents as a disease “the commuter population”–
tell that to my immigrant Ph.D. father and immigrant 3 master’s degrees mother.
here’s a possible explanation to your question as to “why the same isn’t true of immigrants and their children today”
The immigration landscape has changed over the years–immigrant parents were basically allowed in only with the promise of their high education, their extensive family ties, or their extreme wealth. my parents, belonging in the first group, soon made their mark and moved to the suburbs, not NYC, which is “no place to raise a family.”
in fact, immigration happening during the 80’s was really low (coming from overseas) for parents with kids my age. Most overseas immigrant parents belong in one of those three categories i mentioned above, thereby placing themselves in places facilitating good schools, hard work, etc.
On top of that SEAS had made serious changes back then to make SEAS completely integrated into the undergrad experience from a more grad program biased experience. Deans Colombo and Galil both spoke of the time you were in school as a “drastically different experience.”
there are no undergrad SEAS allowed to commute today, and there probably is no demand for a commuting option.
@Alum You’re reading something into my comment that wasn’t there. The phrase “commuter population” isn’t disparaging in at all; it’s merely descriptive. How do you think I should have phrased it? If I had referred to the “residential population” would you think I was rferring to them as if they were a disease?
And I’m sorry if you don’t like what I said, but I was there and you weren’t. The majority of SEAS commuters were indeed either immigrants or the children of immigrants. There were plenty of other SEAS undergrads from the NYC area but a larger proportion of them lived on campus.
Your explanations of why things have changed are probably correct, but the fact that I didn’t know these things doesn’t make my comment demeaning toward either immigrants or commuters.
@Ummm huh? I’m an undergrad SEAS commuter. Who did you talk to?
—
and re #18: What kind of jackass company only hires top five? Do you really want to work at a company with recruiters that dumb?
Bonus: I work at a rather large company (provides a non-trivial percentage of NYC jobs) which most certainly recruits at CU, but also recruits at strong state honors schools. If you’re qualified, you’ll get in the door. If you’re an arrogant asshat, it’ll probably show, no matter where you went to school.
@another alum Not to stir up the old BC/CU controversy, but this is exactly the same reason why Barnard dropped out of the US News rankings.
@columbia is low because people here think incentivized is a word
@yea always thought duke was way overrated. even more so than penn. college in durham founded by some tobacco mogul well after the turn of the 20th century shouldn’t be where it is.
@Duke is far, far too high on the list.
@NotPenn Problems:
1. Penn
2. Duke (a little bit)
3. Caltech shouldn’t count. Too small. Not fair.
Fixed:
1. Princeton
2. Harvard
3. Yale
4. Stanford
5. MIT
6. Columbia
Others
@penn=ttt It’s actually ’06 numbers.
But you’re right, Columbia will rise to #8 at least next year. Look at it this way… there’s only 1 school seperating Columbia & MIT and that’s Duke.
There’s just so many things wrong with this scenario.
@well Keep in mind these stats, particularly the “selectivity” numbers, are still from ’05. That means Columbia’s uber-competitive past two years have yet to take effect. What’s really BS about the rankings is the fact that one quarter of the weight is based on “peer” evaluations, which is ridiculous considering college presidents are incentivized to lie about themselves and their close competitors.
With regard to Penn, I assume Wharton pulls up the rest of the colleges.
@Penn-is Can somebody please explain how UPenn consistently ranks higher than Columbia? It boggles my mind…
@NotPenn The same way they rank higher than MIT.